Tender Morsels (21 page)

‘I don’t think Bear flew at all,’ said Liga, squeezing a clothful of water over Urdda’s dusty hair.

‘No, nor do I,’ said Branza. ‘Bear changed into a moon-bear and magicked us to sleep.’

‘And then what?’ said Urdda. ‘Where did he go then? And why can we not go there too?’

‘Why would you want to?’ said Branza.

‘Because
Bear
is there, that is why! And other people and things, surely.’ Urdda caught Branza’s warning glance and shrugged. ‘All the wonderful things Mam tells of in her bed-stories.’

‘But all the dreadful things too,’ said Branza darkly. ‘Evil warlocks and greedies and those horrid horses with the eyes like carriage-lamps. Why would you want to go to a place like that?’

‘Because it is there! Because you
can
—or you must be able to somehow, if Bear went, and—’ She twitched at another meaningful stare from her sister. ‘
I
would want to see it, anyway. You don’t have to come. I think a person should see everything there is to see.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Liga. ‘Perhaps an older person. I think you belong here with me, the both of you, for a good while yet. And by the growing of mysterious trees and the plumping-out of pieces of cliff-faces to catch you, I would say some powerful person agrees with me.’

Liga chose a market day, when there would be more people about. She took the girls to the Whistle to visit Keller’s daughter Ada so that she would be alone. Slowly she walked up the town. Everything was reassuringly the same as usual—goodwives going about their business, greeting her here and there—and around and among them the mysterious affairs of men went on, which seemed to involve standing in confident attitudes together and talking earnestly when they were not driving carts or toiling in smithies and workshops. If she drew near any talkers, she knew, they would gently recoil, and glance at her and nod without greeting her, not interrupting their talk.

She had considered these men. She hardly knew any by name; most had been replaced by the light-brown-haired folk, and somehow she could not approach those ones; they existed to be strangers, to make the town amiable and bustling with their numbers. She thought, but vaguely and glancingly, about her own purposes—they were to look into someone’s eyes as she had looked into Bear’s and see thoughts shifting there; to reach out and touch the skin of someone who had lived a little, as she herself had—skin that was not the pearls and peaches of her daughters’ faces; that was roughened somewhat, maybe flecked with a scar, and under which she might sense, as she had sensed perhaps with Bear, something of her own uncertainty, her own hopefulness. This was what she thought she wanted.

She had settled—so lightly and timidly that it could hardly be called settling—on Joseph the Lathe, who worked behind his father Tomas in the woodshop in the eastern lanes. Joseph was diligent, kind-faced; he was golden-haired like herself. She walked across the market square, her head thudding with nervous blood. Nobody seemed to notice that she carried this emotion among them, so inappropriate to the place, though her face felt rigid with it. The feeling tottered and tangled inside her, and she had to rest on a bench against the pot-man’s shop wall. Fear, it was—the relief of recognising it made her sag. She had not felt real fear in
a long time—the pulsing of it, the discomfort of her innards. And why was she afraid? Da was gone, dead forever. All the young men who might harm her were gone. She was here, in this place that had never done her any damage and never would. It had given her everything she wanted, these seven years; why should it not deliver her this, a loving connection with some kind man?

Up she got, still frightened but more determined now, and she went into the lanes and found the woodshop. Tomas was not at his lathe by the door. Oh, good, she thought, they are gone out and there is nothing I can do. But there was Joseph, working deeper in the shop, as always. Well, see how it is all arranged for you? she told herself anxiously. The lane was quiet, though people passed at both ends of it.

‘Good morning,’ she said, standing in the doorway. How could a person be clumsy, just standing? And yet she felt she was, as clumsy as one of those blocks of boxwood being seasoned there, unshaped, indelicate.

Joseph lifted his kind face. ‘Good morning, miss,’ he said in his quiet way.

‘May I watch awhile?’

‘Of course you may.’ And he went to his work again.

She brought forward one of the stools with the turned legs, that stood against the wall. She had plainer ones at home. Were she married to a woodworker, she might have him make any number of fancy things for her house.

But where would that house be? She settled quietly on the stool, watching Joseph’s profile. Would he join her in the forest, or would she move to the town, into the house with his parents and his brothers and sisters? Either place was outlandish; a marriage, a wedding with herself as bride, was outlandish. How did girls move such concentrated beings, bent over their work, towards marriage? How was the thing done?

‘Where is your father today?’ she asked him.

‘Out at the woodmen’s camp, selecting,’ he said.

There, see? No one would return and thwart her if this was what she wanted. Liga watched the work, the wood-dust flying and the
shavings spiralling off; a bowl refining itself in his hands; the hands themselves. How was a girl to distract them from such usefulness; to attract them to herself, to her own hands, to her face? And she felt the scratchy-wood pads of Bear’s paw against her cheek, and she saw his eyes full of wonder and puzzlement, and she heard the breath in his big bear-lungs.

‘Tell me, Joseph,’ she said. ‘Do you have a . . . sweetheart? Do you have a girl?’

‘I do not,’ he said to the bowl, in a manner that neither rebuffed her nor drew her on, so that she gained nothing from the question beyond the information. Well, that was something, was it not?

‘Do you wish for one?’ Oh, how bald that sounded. ‘Sometimes?’ she added, to soften it; and then, ‘Ever?’ quite at a loss.

He gave her a look. There was something of a smile in it—was he laughing at her, at her clumsiness, at the effort this took? There was—oh, she did not know any more how to read anyone’s face but her daughters’! She was not fit to be outside her home, she was such a poor judge of people.

‘You don’t?’ I sound pitiful, she thought. And so sad!

He gave her a second look, as unreadable as the first. He had heard her, then. Did he perhaps have no opinion yet? But look at those hands; they were a man’s hands. And look at that face, the jaw fully squared and glittering with stubble. Was he too shy to answer, then? She had chosen him for his shyness, she reminded herself; she had known he would not be sure enough of himself to harm her. Perhaps she had known she would have to put the thought into his head, that he was too timid to think it himself.

So, holding her breath, she reached out and rested the backs of her fingers against Joseph’s cheek.

His skin was warm; the scratch of stubble along his jawline matched the sparkle of it in the sunlight on his chin and around his mouth.

He moved the bowl fractionally so that it was not against the lathe; he removed his foot from the wooden pedal under the workbench and the spinning lathe slowed. Liga took back her hand, frightened.

Joseph sat unperturbed, the bowl in his hands, his wrists resting
against the workbench. And then he would have returned to the work—Liga saw his thigh tense to replace his foot on the pedal—had she not said, ‘Joseph?’

His thigh relaxed, but still he looked down at the lathe—he was not impatient to start again, but . . .

She glanced up and down the empty laneway. She took hold of Joseph’s elbow in one hand and the bowl in the other, and she lifted his arm from the bench and unbent it, and laid hand and bowl in her own lap. She took the bowl from him and placed it back on the workbench. The unresisting hand lay in her lap—a man’s hand, a strange animal. She fitted her own hand into the palm, lifted it, and slid her other hand underneath. Joseph’s was warm; it was furred here and there with wood-dust that fell onto her skirt; the back was covered with strong, short hairs, bowed like eyelashes, springy. Did the hand grip her in return, or had she pushed the fingers into place herself, around her wrist?

‘Sometimes I find myself lonely,’ she said towards the hand. ‘I thought you might also feel this, if you are grown now, if there is no girl.’

She lifted her face, and there was Joseph’s. But his eyes did not hold the thoughts, the troubles, or the desires Liga had hoped to see. Instead, the young man’s customary kindness had unfixed itself somehow, was interrupted with a flickering in the pupils, so that instead of black depths there ran a glimpse of sky, a glimpse of frost, grainy grey streaks blowing across a pale blankness.

‘Joseph!’ she whispered in fright. ‘Master Lathe!’

And his eyes were all kindness again. ‘Miss?’ he said.

‘My name is Liga,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ His hand lay warm in hers. It seemed to Liga that he looked upon her much as he had been looking at the bowl as it came into being against the lathe.

‘What was that?’ She was hot with fear. ‘What happened to you just now? To your eyes?’

‘You asked too much of me, Liga.’ He lowered his eyes, but she had seen the sky rushing in them again. ‘I was not made for it.’

‘For what?’ She hardly wanted to ask.

‘To . . . to feel anything for myself. Lonely or no.’

Liga was stiff with terror. The wind, the frost, and worst of all, the vast emptiness she had seen behind his eyes translated itself into his voice. If she could see them now, they would be blank as the moon. But he had used her name,
Liga
. He had known her better than Joseph the Lathe ought to, better than Ada Keller or Wife Taylor or anyone in this town or country did, better maybe even than she knew herself. To her very depths, with all her secrets, she was known by everyone here, by everything.

Joseph kept his gaze on their hands, but the light from his eyes stuttered in her lap. The world was flimsy around her; it rippled like embroidery on a curtain, and beyond the curtain was chaos, and a light that might blind her.

Trembling in the trembling world, she took up the wooden bowl and thrust it into his hand. His fingers closed on it, firm and limber, and he smiled at Liga. His pupils were dark again, but he did not seem relieved, or even properly aware of what had just passed; he was only his kind self, the same as ever. He turned back to the lathe and set it spinning again.

Rain was falling quite hard outside the woodshop door, where the sun had beamed down from a clear sky moments before. Two men passed and hailed Joseph, and he nodded and kept on working. They walked by without a glance at Liga.

She jumped up, knocking the stool over. Joseph did not even start. She could snatch the bowl from him, she suspected, and fling it out onto the wet cobbles, take up that mallet there and smash his creation to pieces, and he would only take up the next block of rough wood and begin again.

She hurried out of the shop, into the gasping-cold rain. The two men were walking away, their soaked backs to her. The sky was black and churning; wives exclaimed at upstairs windows, pulling in curtains, slamming shutters.

Liga ran, taking the beating of the rain as her punishment, icy arrows in her stupid head, cold lashes across her shoulders. None of it is real, she thought, not this rain, not these slippery streets, not these houses, that wife hurrying, that carter leading
his soaking horse. She boiled with embarrassment and with fear; she must push him out of her memory, Joseph the Lathe, with his warm hand and his white eyes. She must run away from him hard, through the lashing rain, and find as soon as possible her Branza, her Urdda—her little daughters, the only true people in this world besides herself.

Time passed, and Liga was a score and ten years old, Branza fifteen summers beautiful, and Urdda fourteen years lively. Life was good for the women in the cottage; Liga toiled every day to make it so, to keep it so, to deserve it. Since she had sat in the woodshop and seen how fragile was their safety, she had been unable to rest; she might have been broidering the very forest, the very weather, into existence; she might have been stitching the seam where earth meets sky, so assiduously did she apply herself, and so constantly. The anxiety she had stirred that sunny-rainy day was now bound into her bones the way blood is, the way muscles are tethered in; in order to feel any joy, she must always be paying, always be showing how seriously she took this place she had been given, how willing she was to pretend it was all true.